S.A. college push on national stage

Mayor Julian Castro, left, converses with City Year participant Cristina Flores and Rob Mosley, school and education partnership director of City Year, during a two-day conference on college readiness and agenda setting for SA2020 at Cafe College on Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012.

Photo By Billy Calzada/San Antonio Express-News

Rey Madrigal, superintendent of the Harlandale Independent School District, signs a board to show his commitment to education during a two-day conference on college readiness and agenda setting for SA2020 at Cafe College on Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012.

Drawing national attention, superintendents of four local school districts vowed Thursday to follow an ambitious citywide plan to improve Latino college graduation rates by “implementing a college and career ready culture” that by 2020 would get 85 percent of their graduating seniors prepared for college.

The four — from the Northside, San Antonio, Harlandale and Southwest independent school districts, which represent a cross-section of San Antonio — signed a commitment to a set of strategies to reach that goal: better use of student data to identify who's ready and who's not, taking a school testing day to administer college

exams and linking core subjects to career and degree options.

“Many communities are talking about these goals across the country, but it's another thing to take action on them,” Greg Darnieder, a top adviser to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, told attendees of a conference to draft the strategies at the city's Café College.

The Education Department is looking to replicate similar initiatives in other cities under an effort to make the United States the world leader in college-degree attainment by 2020.

Darnieder hailed the San Antonio program.

Mayor Julián Castro and representatives of about two dozen partner organizations in the business and education communities joined the superintendents in signing the pledge.

After rolling out the strategies at their own schools, the superintendents will pitch it to the other school districts in Bexar County.

Aligned with a vision for the city articulated in a series of brainstorming meetings known as SA2020, the pact will be the first citywide initiative at the K-12 level to adopt goals across school district lines.

She plans to invite college and university partners for a similar conference next year.

The goal, she said, is to allow the K-12 and higher education sectors to agree on a plan that bridges the divide between high school and college completion. The pact signed Thursday is part of a larger initiative called “Diplomás: More than just an education,” which aims to increase college completion rates by 9 percent for Latinos by 2015. It's funded by the Lumina Foundation's Latino Student Success Effort, a project at work in 11 states.

Teams from the four districts hammered out the strategies Wednesday. The methodology was simple: school districts established a goal, a metric to measure what it would look like, and then outlined strategies districts could use to get there.

Organizers said they wanted to devise plans that schools could quickly implement. The teams, including counselors, curriculum and instruction officials, “data miners” and administrators, pitched their ideas on pieces of butcher paper.

“We are not trying to revolutionize the whole educational system,” said moderator Alma Garcia, a program officer at Educate Texas, an organization that connects civic, business, political and school leaders to pilot education reforms. “We're working on the idea that we can move the needle immediately.”

With 16 school districts in the San Antonio area, it can be difficult to reach consensus on how exactly to tackle large-scale challenges, Perez said. Even determining what it means for a student to be college-ready evoked debate among the teams Wednesday.

Theresa Urrabazo, senior director of research and evaluation at SAISD, pointed out that Texas has 13 indicators to identify a student at risk of dropping out of high school — but no similar profile to identify those who are on track for college.

Perez said San Antonio is experiencing a culture change and across Texas more school districts are forced to confront tougher accountability standards as state and federal funding shrinks. Making it work will require “a good amount of coordination,” Castro said after the event.

“But if it matters to the people at the top, as with the superintendents, it will matter to the institution as a whole,” he said. “With the state of resources, it's important that we collaborate and get districts to work together if we want to see change across the city to improve college readiness.”